I hadn’t worked out in almost a week when I did this run.  I was hungry and under hydrated for the day and I had a headache.  But enough is enough and I made myself go out and do something.  It was just an easy set of pushups and a slow 3-miler but it was better than nothing, made me feel better and got me back on track.

For the pushups I’m back down to week 4 (which is where the app recommends you restart once you complete the final test day).  Week 4 day 1 turned out to be a ridiculously easy workout but I’m going to go with it.  I’ll work my way back up through the end of week 6 and do another max effort test.  The goal is to be up to 100 reps by then.

Also, as a note, the final set on this day was really only 16 reps, but the last set always says XX(+).  Which means if you can do more you should.  On the first trip through the program I never did any more.  Either by choice (in a week like this) or by muscle failure (in weeks 5 and 6).  But this time I’ll push harder and do what I can at the end.  The app lets you click on the set display and adjust the number so that it records what you actually do instead of just what’s programmed.  It’s a neat feature and I didn’t know was there until this workout.

Pushup max effort test.  94 reps.

This time I actually pushed record on the video camera (so to speak).  I know the form isn’t 100%.  I wasn’t trying for form, I was trying for reps.  First, let’s do 100 pushups.  Then we’ll concentrate on doing 100 pushups without stopping.  THEN we’ll concentrate on doing 100 pushups without stopping with perfect form.

I’m happy with my progress.  I need to get my workout (and overall life) rhythm back together.  The 100 pushups program resets to the beginning of week 4 if you want to keep working so that’s what I’m going to do.  Starting tomorrow.

[Yawn] . . .

But at least I went out and got sweaty.

I was really excited for today’s workout.  I’m actually really excited whenever I get a chance to be in and workout in Bangkok because I love to run in Lumpini Park  Which is where I ran today.  The hotel was just about a mile north of Lumpini so I ran down there, did a couple laps through the park and then back to the hotel.

I took a ton of pictures of the park while I was running (which makes my pace for this run actually pretty impressive) but I’ll put them into a separate post where I talk a little more about the park, the pictures, sightseeing and people watching.

I tried to make myself ride the exercise bike at the hotel fitness center.  Really, I did.  But after twenty minutes I was ready to gouge my eyes out so I bailed.  Meaning that the pushups I started my workout with were the only workout I really did on Monday.

This one was tough.  I gave myself a total of 2-minutes extra rest during the sets and I still had to break the final set of 60 into three chunks.  Ouch.  274 pushups total in this workout and it’s the last one in the scheduled program.  Next up, max effort test.  Gonna be interesting.

The “fitness center” at the Grand Hyatt Erawan was a joke.  I didn’t take any pictures of the facility itself which is a fail on my part, but what was awesome was the treadmill itself.  This was the nicest treadmill I have ever run on.  It was so nice I took pictures of it.

This thing had a really nice touch screen monitor with integrated picture and video advertisements and about 20 available languages.  The downside of this was that I couldn’t figure out for the life of my how to set up an interval workout, which is what I wanted to do.  That’s why I got stuck just running hard at a relatively steady pace.

The display was really nice and you could hit those arrows on the left of each data field to hide the info.  That was a big deal for me.  Running on treadmills can be boring sometimes and the worst part is having your time and distance constantly ticking along in front of your face.  “A watched pot never boils” has got nothing on “a watched distance counter never moves” for treadmill runners.  So being able to hide those was  a nice feature.  The not nice feature?  Advertisements for the hotel restaurants while you’re running.  Including full color, high resolution pictures of the food.  Yeah, counterproductive.

But that’s not all.  This treadmill interface was so nice it had GAMES.

They weren’t Civ V or Call of Duty or anything but they were good time killers and better than watching food adverts.  The touchscreen interface worked well but the game AI was pretty dumb.  So much so that the connect form game wasn’t even worth playing once you figured out how it played.  I’d also like to point out that I didn’t play the games while I was running on the treadmill but tried them while I was riding on the exercise bike the next night.

Lastly, I want you to notice the two small yellow levers on the side rails on either side of treadmill in the top picture.  Because I didn’t notice them when I started running.  One of those levers increases or decreases the incline and the other does the speed.  If you’re aware of those levers that’s a really nice feature and one that I did use eventually.  It’s way easier to adjust your speed and intensity by giving one of those levers a quick slap than trying to aim a finger jab at a touchscreen button.  The problem arises if you don’t notice those levers and you accidentally increase the incline by 1.5% without realizing it.  Yeah, don’t do that.

I spent last week from Sunday evening through Thursday close of business at the Grand Hyatt Erawan in Bangkok for a work conference.  It was a really nice hotel and the food for the week was out of control in terms of variety, quality, quantity and frequency.

I brought my workout gear with the best of intentions.  However, I only managed two runs and one pushup workout.  I went down to swim one night and found out the pool was less than a meter deep at one end.  Not exactly conducive to lap swimming.

I so poorly managed my time and motivation on Sunday that I ended up running on the treadmill in the hotel’s joke of a fitness center at 23.30.  Not ideal but at least I did it.

I only did a short run but I went pretty hard . . . at least is felt that way.  The time didn’t really reflect that.

More push-ups.  Not too much extra rest.  30-seconds here and 30-seconds there.  The final 58 weren’t as hard as I expected.

I was going to do another 30-minute lap session in the pool but the weather was amazing today so instead I just spent an hour or two at the pool goofing around, swimming, diving and being a big kid.  Had fun, smoked myself and got a good sunburn.  Days like this make me understand why so many people retire here . . .

I didn’t do this run yesterday like I normally would have because I spent the whole day driving back and forth to Bangkok for a business meeting and then went to a business association dinner event that night.  I could have squeezed the run in somewhere but it would have been a ridiculous pain in the ass or would have meant being up past midnight.  Neither of those was worth it so I ran today.  Flexibility isn’t failure.

Week 6, day 1 of Hundred Pushups.

Ouch.  Unlike the last couple of training days where we were doing four double sets of fewer reps followed by one big set, today we went back to five higher rep sets.

This is a lot reps with only 60-seconds scheduled rest.  I have to confess that after the second, third and fourth sets I did give myself an extra 30-seconds rest.  And even with that I still had to break the reps up into a lot of chunks (using APFT standard rest protocols, naturally).

This was a challenging day.  Based on how this felt, I’m predicting a redo of weeks 5 and 6 after my final max effort test.

Another thing that I like about this program is the rep counts.  Instead of just using equal reps across all sets I feel like the pattern they’re using is a huge psychological boost (heavy in the front, “easy” sets in the middle and then a hard effort at the end).  It’s kind of like a mini version of wave programming (BTW there are much more sophisticated and informative explanations of this protocol across the web on sites like T-Nation and others but this is the shortest and sweetest).